Orenthal wrote:I told CDT someone would come out complaining. Oh and the celebration was complained about too, or maybe just how they celebrated.

FWIW, not in message board land but here in real life, I just spoke with a coworker who lost their mother in the World Trade Center. She is upset with the street celebrations because that is what many in the muslim world did after al Qaida attacked us.

I myself thought that the street celebrations were pretty awesome until I heard her perspective. Now my views are tempered, but I still think it was kind of cool.

I can respect that POV.

"When a man with money meets a man with experience, the man with experience leaves with money and the man with money leaves with experience."

No, because it probably isn't in the ocean, because we're probably being lied to as to exactly how, where and when this went down.

Of course it ain't in the ocean.

This is the old "We took Sparky to the farm where he could run and play with other dogs" bullshit. Some muslims will sleep better believing it.

Trying hard to come up with a coherent rationale for saying we buried him at sea when we didn't. Seemed to me like a legit attempt to pacify outraged Muslims. What's our upside to holding on to a rotting corpse? Don't get this line of thinking at all.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

No, because it probably isn't in the ocean, because we're probably being lied to as to exactly how, where and when this went down.

Of course it ain't in the ocean.

This is the old "We took Sparky to the farm where he could run and play with other dogs" bullshit. Some muslims will sleep better believing it.

Trying hard to come up with a coherent rationale for saying we buried him at sea when we didn't. Seemed to me like a legit attempt to pacify outraged Muslims. What's our upside to holding on to a rotting corpse? Don't get this line of thinking at all.

I have a hard time believing they shot him, wrapped him in flowing whites and then flew him 700 miles to the nearest 'sea' after finding a muslim cleric to perform 'last rites'. I think he's in a hole, cave or freezer somewhere awaiting his last great indignity.

My guess is that Muslim leaders, like folks here, will want to see proof that we did what we said we did. Surely we were thorough enough to have videotaped the process at every step to document it, right?

Now the judgement call is...do we "defile the dead" by showing the tape or allowing it to leak to the public, or just endure the doubts of the skeptics. Something tells me the Muslim world will be outraged either way.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

No, because it probably isn't in the ocean, because we're probably being lied to as to exactly how, where and when this went down.

Of course it ain't in the ocean.

This is the old "We took Sparky to the farm where he could run and play with other dogs" bullshit. Some muslims will sleep better believing it.

Trying hard to come up with a coherent rationale for saying we buried him at sea when we didn't. Seemed to me like a legit attempt to pacify outraged Muslims. What's our upside to holding on to a rotting corpse? Don't get this line of thinking at all.

According to some reports, a burial at sea for these folks is highly frowned upon. So perhaps this was the USA's way of saying F - U to the towel heads.

Then I could see them traveling 700 miles out of their way to drop his ass.

Point is is that no radical muslims will be appeased by following muslim burial protocol and the people who extracted that body aren't dignitaries and have all lost friends/family/both in the last ten years because of that asshole.

If you think they're going out of their way to follow protocol I think you're mistaken. I do think they'd go out of their way to follow literal protocol if it also meant fucking with that PoS as well though.

e0y2e3 wrote:Frankly, I am with dan but in a bit of a different way.....

The biggest FUCK OFF you can give someone is by showing how much better than them you are. This goes to exhile's point on the celebration thing.

Us Doing The "Proper" Thing is the biggest middle finger I have ever seen given, thus I believe they did it.

Maybe. I still have a hard time buying it given the distance to the Arabian Sea and the general disdain the professionals who extracted him would have. Their way of showing how much better they are would be to throw him in the nearest pre-dug hole and walk away like it was a 40min jog on the beach.

That'd be more in line with them being bigger and badder than the whole fucking nation of Islam.

I really doubt he mae it to the sea unless in some way that would have been , as Lubber mentioned, less than what the radicals would have preferred.

e0y2e3 wrote:My biggest question on that is, was he dropped off on a flight to an AC?

That makes the most sense to me.

Helos wouldn't have come from an AC 600-700 miles away. Although that doesn't mean they didn't leave the extraction site and put him on a plane that was headed to a carrier.

I dunno. Never a part of that life or that scene so I don't what of I speak. I do know those spec ops, seals, etc are wired differently than pretty much anyone. We may never know what happened to that human bag of shit.

Cerebral_DownTime wrote:They'll release the pictures just like Uday, Qusay, and Zarqawi.

They have to don't they? If they time stamp his forehead all the better. Because there are already people out there who don't believe a word of this.

And Donny, from an operational standpoint I agree that OBL was not quite irrelevant but well on his way. But from a sense of national pride/shame you just couldn't let the dude they did you like that live a comfortable life in a hut or an uncomfortable one in a cave, right?

Dude HAD to go down if for no other reason than to serve notice that shit like that costs you your life at one time or another. Whatever the cost in dollars.

e0y2e3 wrote:Frankly, I am with dan but in a bit of a different way.....

The biggest FUCK OFF you can give someone is by showing how much better than them you are. This goes to exhile's point on the celebration thing.

Us Doing The "Proper" Thing is the biggest middle finger I have ever seen given, thus I believe they did it.

Maybe. I still have a hard time buying it given the distance to the Arabian Sea and the general disdain the professionals who extracted him would have. Their way of showing how much better they are would be to throw him in the nearest pre-dug hole and walk away like it was a 40min jog on the beach.

That'd be more in line with them being bigger and badder than the whole fucking nation of Islam.

I really doubt he mae it to the sea unless in some way that would have been , as Lubber mentioned, less than what the radicals would have preferred.

NY Times and other mainstream sources reporting that the names and other information about two of bin Laden couriers which eventually led directly to the locating and killing of OBL, were extracted from KSM and one other top al Qaeda operative when they were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques (read:waterboarding) at CIA prisons in Poland and Romania in 2007 and/or subsequently at Gitmo.

Any waterboarding opponents (you know who you were) rethinking that opposition?...now that we know we'd probably still be looking for the guy had we not used it?

Does the fact that we used the technique on only a handful of high-value prisoners make it more justifiable?

Does the fact that it clearly worked make the arguments of its opponents that "it doesn't work" seem a bit empty and foolish today?

Does the fact that various journalists have undergone the technique with no lasting physical or emotional after-effects...and our own soldiers are subjected to it in training...and that it does no permanent physical damage to its subjects...any of that...make it in retrospect reasonable to say that it walks up to "the line" of torture, but doesn't cross it?

Given the above, you know where I stand...right where I stood before. It's not torture to scare information out of somebody with a technique that he walks away from without a scratch. (And if the mass-murdering terrorist is emotionally scarred in some way, I don't give a flying fuck)

In other words...does all of the above, when coupled with the fact that the hated GWB is no longer in charge of the process, make this practice any less offensive to the people who were morally outraged by it five or so years ago?

Just wondering.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

I give credit to Obama for not shutting down G'Mo and not stopping with what is no longer called torture but rather 'Advanced Interrogation Techniques'.

There has never been an issue with employing the technique far as I'm concerned. Not when it was torture and not now that it's been given a cute, little bunny's name.

Still wish they woulda tased OBL instead of putting two in his head though. Better yet if a cop had done it instead of a SEAL. Cops busting out their tasers is cruel and deadly and that's what he deserved.

And it sickens me too that they walked into a sovereign nation like a buncha chopper-riding cowboys and iced a guy before trying him.

Actually, Obama did rule out any further use of waterboarding, and made a great grandstanding show of what he called "outlawing torture" too. If I may make some points about double standards in media treatment of anti-terror practices...

He did continue to employ Gitmo, other offsite prisons, unlimited detention of combatants without charge, rendition, predator drone strikes, other targeted killings, military tribunals, and many of the other terror-fighting practices that he railed against during the campaign as way to smear Bush. I'm not being critical of him for continuing to use these techniques. They were sensible and necessary wartime practices then, and they are sensible and necessary wartime practices now. Just don't expect any apologies...or acknowledgments..from anyone on the BDS left that they are still doing under the Democrat all the things they said were war crimes for 7 years under a Republican. The double-standard would be astonishing if we weren't so used to seeing it employed.

What's different now is the way those practices are treated by the media, and by the suddenly comatose "anti-war" movement. Now that we're in three wars instead of two, those "rallies", the highly publicized "body counts" and all the rest, have shrunk to next to nothing. Why is that?

Another example is the disparate treatment of the recent Afghan "kill team" story, and the Abu Grahib incident under Bush. Abu Grahib was front-page news in the NYT for 40-some consecutive days, and it involved non-lethal abuse of Iraqi prisoners by a small isolated group of a few US troops. The recent kill team incidents involved the intentional killing of (dozens?) of Afghan civilians by a small, isolated group of US troops...and it generated almost nothing in the media. The scale of the abuses don't even compare, yet one was a horrific indictment of our military and by implication its C in C. The other way more serious abuse, barely a blip on the media radar. The difference is the party of the President. Period.

And don't expect any intellectual honesty or consistency from the Israel-hating left next time the Israelis pull off a targeted assassination of a Hamas terrorist, just because they were perfectly OK with Obama doing the exact same thing with OBL. They will concoct a distinction somehow.

Cindy Sheehan is the same raving loon that she was five years ago, and still making crazy conspiratorial statements (see yesterday, for example). The difference now is that she is no longer useful to the left as a grieving parent to exploit to beat Bush over the head, so she no longer makes the nightly news on a regular basis.

Hope this is lucid...and not sarcastic...not a farce, and heaven forbid, not partisan. It's mostly an observation on media priorities...not a criticism of our president...just to be clear.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

Orenthal wrote:because that is what many in the muslim world did after al Qaida attacked us.

Yah, I'm with that perspective.

I'm not feeling a whole lot of emotion one way or the other regarding the street celebrations aside from the fact that they just didn't make a whole lot of sense to me....

I mean I guess I just find it weird that thousands of Americans were dancing in the streets celebrating the US killing a guy that killed so many Americans. Just an odd choice to react that way IMO.

I mean whatever, free country and all, but it def seemed a bit more Muslim extremist than Joe Six Pack American IYAM.

I would describe my own feelings when finding out as muted relief followed by the realization that it didn't really move the needle much in the grand scheme of things. That it took a decade certainly removes plenty of the excitement for me.

At this point the sad truth of the matter is that it means alot more to Obama's future political career than it does towards winning that "war" as far as I can see.

Any waterboarding opponents (you know who you were) rethinking that opposition?...now that we know we'd probably still be looking for the guy had we not used it?

Not one bit.

Does the fact that we used the technique on only a handful of high-value prisoners make it more justifiable?

No.

Does the fact that it clearly worked make the arguments of its opponents that "it doesn't work" seem a bit empty and foolish today?

Nope. To me, wrong is wrong.

Does the fact that various journalists have undergone the technique with no lasting physical or emotional after-effects...and our own soldiers are subjected to it in training...and that it does no permanent physical damage to its subjects...any of that...make it in retrospect reasonable to say that it walks up to "the line" of torture, but doesn't cross it?

Once. They went through it once.

lol. You could've just addressed the post to me, I wouldn't have been offended.

The document below constitutes the minutes from a meeting held at Guantanamo in early autumn, 2002. It is presented with minimal editorial comment, as I believe it speaks for itself. So far as I know, no other transcription of this document, minus certain excerpts, has ever been published or posted before. It is done so here as a public service, to promote the position that prosecution of the government's torture crimes is of paramount importance.

Cast of characters:Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo; Lt. Col. Jerald Phifer, who sent a memo to Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, Commander of Joint Task Force (JTF) 170, requesting approval for more "severe interrogation techniques" (Dunleavy told a superior that Phifer was his "point of contact" on interrogation matters); Major John Leso, a military psychologist, who was present at the torture interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani(Leso, like Major Burney in the minutes, were members of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team [BSCT] -- Burney is reportedly a psychiatrist -- last month, the Convening Authority of Military Commissions at Guantanamo dropped the charges against al-Qahtani, concluding his treatment amounted to torture); Dave Becker, representing the Defense Intelligence Agency; and John Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA's counter-terrorism center.

I'd like to make only two observations that I think are relevant at this point. One, it is clear that coercive interrogations amounting to torture had already begun at Guantanamo prior to this October 2002 meeting. In the document itself, the participants have a general discussion recalling how prisoner "063", Mohammed al-Qahtani, "has responded to certain types of deprivation and psychological stressors," indicating, perhaps, that al-Qahtani was some kind of experimental test case. (H/T to Trudy Bond, who noted this fact in an article published at Counterpunch earlier this year.)

Secondly, it struck me when transcribing these minutes the degree to which John Fredman, the CIA legal counsel and rep to this meeting, dominated the discussion. All the participants seem to bow to his authority, especially on legal issues, with Lt. Col. Beaver chiming in as well. While the BSCT members -- who are the medical professionals present -- appear to criticize "fear-based" interrogations techniques at the beginning of the meeting, in favor of rapport-building, as well as abusive environmental "approaches," as the discussion veers more and more to propositions regarding blatant torture, like the "wet towel" (waterboarding) technique, nary a protest is heard from these individuals, who have by their actions disavowed the ethics of their medical and/or psychological professions.

I ride motorcyles with General Mike Dunleavy, who is also a judge..He thinks Waterboarding is cool

No I'm not shittin ya.... I also have a picture of me shaking hands with Paul Wolfowitz [for jb, especially].... just cuz I had the opportunity

Cerebral_DownTime wrote:To be honest, I have no problem with using the Predator, targeted killings, or military tribunals.

You know, a real nit-picking asshole might come in here and point out the logical or moral inconsistency in saying it's OK to drop a missile in a suspected terrorist's living room, blowing him, his wife and kids, and anyone else in the building with him to smithereens, but it's inexcusable and morally wrong to pour water on his face.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

Cerebral_DownTime wrote:To be honest, I have no problem with using the Predator, targeted killings, or military tribunals.

You know, a real nit-picking asshole might come in here and point out the logical or moral inconsistency in saying it's OK to drop a missile in a suspected terrorist's living room, blowing him, his wife and kids, and anyone else in the building with him to smithereens, but it's inexcusable and morally wrong to pour water on his face.

First off, I didn't "advocate" for much of anything above....other than stating my belief that waterboarding is somewhere short of torture, IMO.

You turned the question around to my beliefs rather than address the confusing logic behind yours....which I guess I can compress into "targeted killings are OK, but waterboarding is not". I'll continue to await your answer.

I suppose my Christian values would tend toward a statement of the reverse of that...one being non-lethal, and all. That said, while it's always dicey to get into "good vs evil" characterizations, I think a mass murderer of innocents...one sworn to commit additional mass murders at his first opportunity, could be safely placed on the "evil" side of that register. Evil must be confronted and fought by good. Christianity is not wholly synonymous with pacifism, despite its "turn the other cheek" teaching. Any thinking person...religious or not..is conflicted by the horrors of war and the wrenching decisions we must make to preserve what we all (I think) view as an objective "good"....freedom. I'm not prepared to quote Aquinas on "just war" theory, but I believe there is such a thing.

As far as reconciling waterboarding with a general belief in "do unto others...", I guess if I were captured by an enemy, I would want them to "do unto me" by simulating drowning to get the information they wanted rather than use the blowtorches, pliers, genital electrodes or whatever else they might have at their disposal.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

You turned the question around to my beliefs rather than address the confusing logic behind yours....which I guess I can compress into "targeted killings are OK, but waterboarding is not". I'll continue to await your answer.

Targeted killings I accept as a part of the war. Just like they did with Uday, Qusay, and Zarqawi in Iraq.

Waterboarding IMO is torture ( you don't consider it so and that's fine, different strokes and all), and my personal belief is untill John Yoo tried changing the rules by redfining it as EIT 2002 we've never used it, relying on the skill of of Intell people.

There's a difference IMO between holding a person in custody and waterboarding them many times over, than say target killing a guy on the battlefield.

And Jesus faced Global Terrorist on a much much larger scale, the Romans.

John Yoo did his job...which was to give legal advice to his superiors, so they could provide guidance to operatives dealing with complicated ethical issues. That he was targeted for criminal prosecution for having policy differences with the political opposition at the time is a disgrace, and a dangerous precedent, no matter what side you're on.

"I believe it is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting." H.L. Mencken

danwismar wrote:John Yoo did his job...which was to give legal advice to his superiors, so they could provide guidance to operatives dealing with complicated ethical issues. That he was targeted for criminal prosecution for having policy differences with the political opposition at the time is a disgrace, and a dangerous precedent, no matter what side you're on.

Hey we agree on something! I don't want Yoo prosectuted either, he's just a toadie. I disagree with what he did, but it'll turn into a tit for tat thing. "You prosecuted my guy so i'm gonna do the same to your boy huurrr!".